[ih] reinventing the wheel, was Internet History Lives on the Internet?

[John R. Levine]

>     - Content is stored outside of BitTorrent per se, e.g., on web
> servers.  Torrent servers essentially act as caches for material in
> transit. ...

Dunno where you'd have heard that, because that's exactly what bittorrent 
and other p2p software don't do.  Every node serves what it has, including 
material it's downloaded from other nodes.  Each file is divided into 
smallish pieces which are downloaded and served separately.  If you're 
downloading, say, a linux DVD ISO, which is a thousand pieces, you can 
watch as it sucks down and reassembles the pieces in whatever order it can 
find them, and at the same time starts serving the pieces it's already 
got.  If you leave the client running, it'll continue to serve them.

One of the reasons that people use p2p for pirated stuff is that there's 
no central copy, so there's no single place one can make a file go away. 
It really is your file botnet.

>     - There isn't any obvious (to me) way to restrict what your personal
> machine might store or serve.

It only serves what it's got, and it's only got what you've told it to 
download or added locally.

Since you are apparently interested in p2p file distribution, why not 
install a bittorrent client (the ones at bittorrent.com are OK) and try it 
out for a few minutes.

R's,
John

PS: I realize this is the Internet History list, but it's like the history 
stopped 20 years ago.